Self-Transcendence via New Scientist

A FEW years ago, psychiatrist  Roland Griffiths  published the results of some intriguing work with people facing imminent death. His team wanted to see if it was possible to reduce  anxiety  and  depression in people diagnosed with terminal cancer  by inducing an intense self-transcendent experience, in which a person’s  sense of self temporarily falls away .Fifty-one people received two doses of the psychedelic  psilocybin , previously shown experimentally by Griffiths and others to reliably induce what they call “mystical-type” experiences. Five weeks after the first dose,  63 per cent of them had a clinically significant reduction in depression symptoms  and 51 per cent saw a reduction in anxiety symptoms. Five months later, many still had fewer symptoms. Frederick Barrett , part of Griffiths’s team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, says it isn’t clear that the therapeutic effect was entirely down to the transcendent experience. But “a lot of people believe that is the case”, he adds, “and I’m one of them”.If he is right, it is a striking example of how self-transcendent experiences, though temporary, can provide a lasting boost to well-being. And they don’t have to be the intense experiences induced by  psychedelics . Just staring in awe at magnificent trees or concentrating intensely on a challenging task also seem to have the capacity to make you  happier , less stressed and kinder to others.Now, some researchers are developing brain stimulation techniques that could induce self-transcendence, or at least accelerate the positive effects of mindfulness and meditation. So, should we all be seeking to lose ourselves more often? And if so, what is the best way to do it?

Self-transcendence is nothing new.  Religious rituals and other cultural practices aiming to induce it have been part of the human experience throughout recorded history , and probably before. As something approaching a scientific discipline, however, the idea can be traced to 19th-century psychologist William James, who did experiments on himself to induce self-transcendent states. “We can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace,” he wrote.Our understanding of the phenomenon has come on a bit since then. In a 2017  paper outlining different kinds of self-transcendent experience ,  David Yaden , a psychologist also at Johns Hopkins, defined them as “transient mental states of decreased self-salience and increased feelings of connectedness” – those moments when self-referential thoughts fade away such that you feel deeply at one with other people or your surroundings. Astronauts gazing back at Earth from outer space, for example, report feeling overwhelming emotion and a deep sense of oneness with humankind. Others report similar experiences during religious awakenings, near-death experiences, supernatural encounters, or the birth of a child.“There is ample evidence from clinical psychology that excessive self-focus can have negative effects”But as Yaden makes clear, self-transcendent experiences exist on a spectrum of intensity: there are the most intense episodes, when your sense of self dissolves entirely, and there are less-intense versions such as the  awe you feel when immersed in nature or the peace and feelings of well-being people report during mindfulness meditation .In pretty much every case, these experiences appear to be good for us. A series of studies published in 2015, for instance, found that people exposed to awe-inducing stimuli such as towering Tasmanian eucalyptus trees or sweeping panoramic videos of mountains and forests were  significantly more likely to report feeling less self-centred and to act more generously in a simulation than those exposed to control stimuli that didn’t induce awe .At the other end of the spectrum are the overwhelming feelings of transcendence induced in Griffiths’s study on mystical experiences, in which 18 healthy adults were administered a placebo or varying doses of psilocybin. The proportion of participants who reported having a mystical experience was greater among those who received the psychedelic and even more so among those who got a higher dose. That much you might expect. What is perhaps surprising is that  those who received psilocybin reported improved mood and more positive attitudes and behaviours , and that those benefits persisted for 14 months after receiving the drug.

Thinking of you

What makes self-transcendent experiences so beneficial? At first blush, you might think it would be unsettling, even terrifying, to suddenly lose your sense of self. Indeed, many people report that intense transcendent experiences are “psychologically challenging and difficult”, according to Yaden. For that reason, clinical trials aimed at inducing these states are done under close supervision. But there is ample evidence from clinical psychology to demonstrate that excessive self-focus can have negative effects – it is a hallmark of depression, for instance – which could explain why reducing that focus, even temporarily, can be helpful.

We have also learned a bit about what happens in the brain during self-transcendence. Imaging studies have repeatedly captured activation of the frontal lobe, part of the brain involved in attention and emotion, and reduced activity in the parietal lobe, which may be associated with the loss of the sense of self, says  Andrew Newberg , a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Pennsylvania. The default mode network, an interconnected set of brain regions thought to be involved in imagination, daydreaming and perspective taking, also tends to be quietened during meditation and transcendent experiences. “It’s probably a very complex set of interactions that are occurring and, to some extent, that can’t be a surprise because of the sort of richness and diversity of these experiences,” says Newberg.

Whatever is going on inside our brains, the evidence suggests that we might all benefit from losing ourselves more often. For most people, psychedelics aren’t really an option. There is an ongoing revolution in their use for clinical therapy. In recent years, trials have demonstrated that drugs including MDMA, LSD and psilocybin can successfully reduce symptoms from a range of disorders from major depressive disorder and anxiety to chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, while psychedelics induce intense transcendence more reliably than anything else, they remain illegal for recreational use in most countries.“

The goal with transcranial focused ultrasound is to boost the positive effects of meditation”

Fortunately, there are other options. For low-intensity transcendent experiences, you can seek awe in nature. Or you can find activities that put you into a flow state, in which you become “completely absorbed in a highly rewarding activity”, says  Richard Huskey at the University of California , Davis. Over the years, studies have shown that experiencing flow can variously help to  prevent work-related depression and burnout ,  build resilience and improve well-being . A 2020 study on people being quarantined due to covid-19, for instance, found that those who engaged in activities that induced a flow state had  significantly improved well-being compared with those who didn’t experience flow .

Huskey says early work suggests flow leads to increased activity in brain regions involved in focus and decreased activation of brain regions associated with self-referential thinking and negative intrusive thoughts. “One potential reason flow might be useful for experiencing well-being is it can distract us from difficult things,” he says. “It essentially refocuses our attention away from negative thoughts and focuses them instead on something that’s intrinsically rewarding.” Or perhaps a flow state simply injects periods of “really intensely rewarding, intensely gratifying experiences” into our everyday life, he says, which in turn translates into higher levels of overall well-being.

What we know is that people induce a flow state by engaging in activities in which they are highly skilled, but that are also challenging. Helpfully, people are generally pretty accurate at guessing what might bring on this state, says Huskey. “I can make a good inference that I’m probably not going to flow when snowboarding down a really easy run on the mountain, but I might feel it on a more difficult run.”

However, all such transcendent experiences, from flow states to mystical episodes induced by psychedelic drugs, are fleeting. Surely it would be better for us to get longer-lasting, or at least more habitual, self-transcendence. That brings us to  mindfulness , typically defined as paying attention, on purpose, to the present moment.

For  Jay Sanguinetti , a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies, mindfulness may actually be a longer-term mental state. He views it as a sort of default state formed by habitual daily experiences and emotional responses. All day your brain is processing information and deciding how to act and respond, he says. “Sometimes that default state can tip into negative emotion, that’s depression. It can tip into anxiety, that’s anxiety disorder. So some people’s default state can become a problem.” Part of mindfulness training, he says, is to habitually change your thought processes about your body and the world around you so that default experience shifts towards a happier and more-balanced state of mind.

One mindfulness-based practice, known as equanimity training, involves viewing a series of emotionally triggering images. Participants track their response to each image, and if the response is negative, seek to redirect their attention to the task of viewing images. “That is changing how you’re emotionally present in the world, and people tend to feel better because they’re letting go of their triggers,” says Sanguinetti. In these days of pandemic and climate crisis, he adds, the ability to resist the sense of threat such scenarios pose may allow people to feel better on a day-to-day basis.

The problem is that when it comes to mindfulness, as with other forms of meditation, it can take years to perfect the techniques and get all the benefits. For instance, one study found that people who had practised meditation for at least three years had less reaction in the amygdala, a brain structure involved in our experience of emotion, when viewing happy or positive pictures compared with people who didn’t meditate. However,  amygdala reactivity to negative pictures was only reduced in long-term meditators , those who had been practising for at least 10 years. The researchers concluded that prolonged meditation practice was required to fully regulate amygdala response to external stimuli. Another study found that  decades of meditation can cause a thickening of parts of the brain associated with attention , interoception (your bodily sensations) and sensory processing.

In any case, self-transcendence through meditation is often only achieved by expert practitioners who have spent decades practising this. But there has been a push to see if the benefits of mindfulness and meditation can somehow be accelerated. In 2007, the Dalai Lama spoke about these challenges during a talk at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington DC. He asked the researchers in attendance to develop an intervention that could accelerate the path to transcendence so that he could spend less time meditating – and more people could enjoy the benefits.

Sanguinetti, who was in the audience that day, set out to do just that. Working with the meditation teacher  Shinzen Young , he pioneered a technique that involves targeting specific parts of the brain such as the right inferior frontal gyrus, an area implicated in mood and emotional regulation, with ultrasonic sound waves. The duo’s goal with the technique, now called transcranial focused ultrasound, is to boost the positive effects of meditation so that they could be more impactful faster.

Brain stimulation

The technology is still in its infancy, and yet the first studies are promising. In a randomised, double-blind controlled trial run by Sanguinetti, 48 participants received either a placebo or 30 seconds of transcranial focused ultrasound. The 24 people who received the stimulation reported  significantly improved mood 20 and 30 minutes afterwards . In a second experiment, researchers carried out functional MRI scans to assess changes in brain activity before and after people underwent 2 minutes of the brain stimulation. They found  significant changes in functional connectivity between different brain regions and notably decreased activity in the default mode network .

Something similar is also being mooted for the flow state. A 2019 study demonstrated that transcranial direct current stimulation, or TDCS, which uses small pulses of electricity rather than ultrasonic waves,  helped induce flow in 32 participants playing video games . “If you apply this TDCS to medial parts of human participants’ brain, parts of the brain associated with, say, self-referential processing, it seems to have a causal impact on people’s ability to experience flow,” says Huskey. He urges caution, however, as this is the only study he knows of that has assessed an application of this technology to induce a flow state.

Sanguinetti similarly says there is a long way to go before we can stimulate the brain into transcendent states. He says his device is designed to accelerate and enhance mindfulness training, rather than induce self-transcendence. But he is bullish about the potential of such interventions. “I do really see the psychedelic science, the contemplative science and the neurotechnology movement, which is what I’m also part of, as creating interventions that help people get on the path to happiness,” he says.

The truth is that you might never experience self-transcendence, no matter how magnificent the view you are enjoying, how focused you are on something, or how much time you commit to perfecting meditation. But ultimately that isn’t a problem, according to Yaden, who argues that when it comes to improving well-being, self-transcendence doesn’t necessarily have to be the end goal.“Practising meditation has a lot of benefits aside from a self-transcendent experience, and while a self-transcendent experience may come, and that is usually beneficial, I don’t think that should be the aim of someone engaging in the practice,” he says. “Rather than going out and trying to seek a mental state, specifically engage in things that are valued and virtuous activities.” Of course, if you find that you lose yourself for a moment, then all the better.

Does dukkha have a functional purpose? What if no one ever suffered? What kind of world would that look like? This is a rabbit hole type of question. 

Chris Marti wrote: Western meditators tend to have a distorted expectation of their spirituality. I think that leads to some of the hardcore practices that pop up periodically, like Actualism. The idea behind those seems to me to be that extreme practices lead to extreme results. Kind of like the shamans the pre-awakened Buddha spent so much time with - the ones who practiced extreme self-denial of various sorts. Westerners tend to think in terms of linear causality, which may or may not apply to meditations and other spiritual practices, like prayer, dreams, vision quests, etc.

Do people honestly think you can just zap your brain and that will have the same effects as a years-long meditation practice? I'm skeptical.